If Feds Stumble, Florida

Stands Ready To Round Up

And Detain Any Refugees

August 11, 1994|By LINDA KLEINDIENST Tallahassee Bureau Chief

TALLAHASSEE — Fearful the federal government won't protect Florida's shores from an onslaught of refugees, state officials have prepared their own emergency plan that they say can be activated within hours.

"Our geography makes us a likely magnet for immigration," said Gov. Lawton Chiles, who met with top state agency officials on Wednesday to review the state plan. "It happened to us once in 1980, and we were good neighbors about that ... but Florida communities will not be held hostage to [Castro's) whim."

If the federal government is slow responding to a mass exodus from Cuba or Haiti, the state is ready to round up refugees and hold them in about 10 temporary detention sites in seven South Florida counties, including Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials confirmed the plan on Wednesday but would not disclose precise locations for the detention centers.

Under the plan, refugees will not remain at those sites for more than a few hours. Instead, they will be transported to Homestead Air Force Base in buses operated by the state Department of Corrections. There, they will be held for immigration processing and screened for health problems.

The state estimates it can handle a maximum of 10,000 refugees at a time.

The federal plan, Operation Distant Shore, calls for preventing a mass influx by using a naval blockade to stop any flood of refugees from Cuba or Haiti.

But state officials have voiced concerns that any blockade will have plenty of holes for refugees to sail through.

For years, the state has prepared and updated its own plans. Now, state officials are so skeptical that the federal plan will work that they are trying to be ready to handle any exodus on their own for up to three days.

"We have to be prepared in case the federal response is slow or inadequate," said Joe Myers, director of the state Division of Emergency Management.

"We will be the first line of defense and response until the feds can assume their responsibilities," said Nancy Wittenburg, of the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.

Regardless of who takes first custody of the refugees, Chiles said federal officials assure him that refugees will not be allowed to stay in Florida. Instead, they will be shipped out of the state within 48 to 72 hours, to military bases in other states.

Florida is still smarting from the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 refugees to Florida in 159 days. At one point, the Orange Bowl had to be used as a processing center.

Florida taxpayers have never been reimbursed for many of the costs the state picked up as a result of the Cuban exodus - and influxes throughout the 1980s of thousands of illegal Haitians and Nicaraguans. Chiles has filed a federal lawsuit seeking reimbursement of more than $1 billion in state and local expenditures to house, educate, imprison and give medical services to illegal aliens.

Chiles, who is up for re-election in November and doesn't want to be embarrassed by an immigration disaster, has urged federal authorities to conduct at least a mock exercise to determine if their plan has any flaws.

"They were talking about doing that next February," Chiles said. "That may be after the fact."

On Tuesday, 10 members of Congress from Florida signed a letter to the Clinton administration asking that the Navy begin to assemble a blockade near Cuba. There is concern that the boats, now surrounding Haiti, may not make it to the Florida Straits in time to stop an exodus.

The state plan calls for the immediate mobilization of 1,000 National Guard troops. And the state has given the U.S. Justice Department names of more than 1,000 South Florida law enforcement officers who could be immediately deputized by federal marshals.

State health labs in Miami, West Palm Beach and Jacksonville are already on alert to handle health tests that will be given the refugees - especially testing for tuberculosis and the AIDS virus.

"Because of what Castro has done, you've got a poor population that may be chronically ill when they get here," said Jim Towey, state HRS secretary. "We're planning for the worst, especially the mentally ill and chronically ill. There's a real possibility we'll need to declare a state health emergency."

He also said the state has made arrangements with air ambulance companies to help in a medical emergency.